I’ve had a bit of a slump in my reading since I read the fun summer blockbuster in book form that was Max Brooks’ Devolution. I’m reading through Or What You Will by Jo Walton. One of the books I read every night I read aloud to my wife every night. That’s how I’m reading Or What You Will, and I’m about 90% through.
The book is a fourth wall shredding narrative about a character who’s worried about a writer. The character isn’t a specific person but a favorit archetype of the author’s. It’s like if the selfish, super-competent wise-cracker who appeared as J in my Flash in the Pan or Ada in Inhumane Resources were one distinct person.
The writer is writing a new book without this trickster archetype, and the character is not happy about it. I was pretty sure I’d read this story before, and I was wrong.
What’s hard about this story is that it’s constantly re-establishing itself the narrator, who doesn’t have a name as far as I’ve gotten, is jumping from story to story, so it’s a lot like reading a bunch of first chapters. Then the character goes back through the author’s life (which I suspect has about a 60% overlap with the actual author, Jo Walton’s life), revisiting it from many eras and many angles.
This means there is a lot of establshing and exposition, and it’s work. Almost every piece of art needs to challenge you in some ways, and this challenges your patience. It brings you to world after world, establishing so many things again and again. It’s like a camping trip where you have to set up a tent four times a day.
Why isn’t this terrible? There are interesting themes that come up from section to section about art, sacrifice, trauma and mortality. It can explore these themes with a lot of bredth because there are a lot of settings to compare.
The narration of the exploring is well woven and full of interesting tidbits. The best parts of it remind me of the good parts of Tom Robbins.
As a writer, I find this story both really impressive and uniquely frustrating. Fantasy involves a giant effort of explaining a world organically. Every word I put in explaining the setting, the architecture and the culture, I mentally imagine the reader’s patience spilling away.
So for me, reading this is like sitting in church, desperately trying to hold in a fart, and then watching Jo Walton waltz in through the doors and farting a perfect rendition of Ave Maria to thunderous applause.
It’s a book that’s mostly fantasy that would be interesting to people who aren’t interested in fantasy. It’s got a very deep relationship between the author and the character. It covers things about what it’s like to write and have this other voice in your head that I haven’t seen before.
I’m not done, but the construction is careful enough that I’m pretty confident that the conclusion will be at worst fair and at best breathtaking. If it’s the latter, I’ll come back and post again about that.
